The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (65 page)

Then, in 1991, these “republics” declared their independence, and suddenly it mattered whether Crimea was in the Russian or Ukrainian republic, or whether the homelands of the Chechens, Byelorussians, and Tatars had the status of full republics, or how many Armenians lived inside the borders of Azerbaijan. Fifteen countries came out of the Soviet Union, and the break-up could have been a lot messier without these convenient dotted lines along which to cut. Even so, five little wars erupted because someone didn’t like the way the borders of the former Soviet republics had been drawn.

GRECO-TURKISH WAR

Death toll:
400,000
¹

Rank:
81

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
Greece vs. Turkey

Time frame:
1919–22

Location:
Turkey

Who usually gets the most blame:
Greeks by the Turks and Turks by the Greeks—never put them in the same room

T
HE OTTOMAN TURKS LOST WORLD WAR I VERY BADLY, SO THE SULTAN IN
Constantinople now lived under the thumb of the victorious Allied powers who forced him to sign away his empire. The French and British grabbed most of the Arab provinces for themselves, and the Italians landed an occupation force in southern Anatolia (the peninsula of Asian Turkey). The Greeks wanted to expand onto the coast of Turkey where Greek minorities still lived under Ottoman rule. Unfortunately, the Greeks and Turks were intermingled throughout Anatolia, so it wasn’t easy to draw a clean border between them.

Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, chief architect of the palace coup that put Greece on the winning side of World War I, landed an army at Smyrna (Izmir nowadays) in May 1919 to annex this mostly Greek city in Turkey. About the same time, however, the Turkish general Mustafa Kemal (later called Ataturk) renounced the sultan and his treaties, and tried to revive the sagging nationhood of Turkey. He set up an opposition government inland, at Ankara.

In the summer of 1920, the Greek army invaded inward from Smyrna toward Ankara, but their soldiers turned undisciplined and brutal as they crossed Turkish territory. As reports of Greek behavior toward Turkish civilians filtered out of the war zone, Greece lost a lot of the international support it had enjoyed at the beginning of the war.

In October 1920, King Alexander of Greece died of an infected monkey bite,
*
so the throne passed back to his father, King Constantine, who had been overthrown in 1917 for being pro-German. About the same time, Prime Minister Venizelos lost his reelection. King Constantine was still rather annoyed at having been overthrown, so he purged the government of his son’s friends. Most Greek officers in the field were immediately fired and replaced by inexperienced officers loyal to the new regime.

“The subsequent display of military incompetence was stunning, and [war correspondent Ernest] Hemingway reported that the new artillery officers ‘massacred their own infantry.’ ”
²

During 1921, the Turks blunted every Greek offensive and fought them to a standstill. The tide turned at the bloody Battle of the Sakarya River in August 1921.
³
A year later, in August 1922, Mustafa Kemal launched an offensive that broke the Greeks and drove them back to the coast. Bitter in defeat, the Greeks “set fire to village after village as they fled through them, leaving a trail of burning ruins.”
⁴

The Greeks retreated to the port of Smyrna, trailing thousands of refugees behind them as Greek civilians fled Turkish retaliation. The Greek army scrambled out of Smyrna, but there wasn’t enough shipping to evacuate the civilians. Soon the Turkish army arrived and began to loot and shoot up the Armenian quarter. Fires they set here consolidated and spread, driven into the Greek quarter by the wind and the Turks. As the fire swept across the city from September 13 to 15, desperate Greeks and Armenians swarmed over the docks, looking for ships to take them to safety. Throughout the night, Turks arrived to rape refugees or shove them off the pier into the sea, and they stopped only when ships in the harbor shone their searchlights over them and threatened to fire their guns. The Turks rounded up all of the Armenian males of fighting age and herded them inland, which was the last anyone heard of them.

Officially, 2,000 people died in the fire, but as many as 200,000 Greeks and Armenians disappeared and were never accounted for. The Turks swear the fire was accidental and beyond their control, but coincidentally the Turkish quarter was spared the devastation that destroyed the rest of Smyrna.

Once military events determined that the border was going to stay put, the two countries shoved people around to fit it. In order to remove any excuse for another Greek invasion in the future, Turkey roughly rounded up and expelled all of the Greeks. Greece then decided to make room for the incoming Greeks by expelling all of the Turks. Because the Turks ended up in control of all of the disputed territories, three times as many Greeks as Turks were on the wrong side of the border.

Approximately 375,000 Turks and 1.25 million Greeks were uprooted and exiled, making it the largest mass resettlement in history up to that point. The Greeks definitely got the worst of the ethnic cleansing, and they were tossed out with less preparation and less room aboard the ships. Greece had difficulty absorbing all these new people. Athens and Salonika were packed with twice their normal population, and 875,000 Greek refugees—almost three-fourths of the total—required government support to survive. By 1923, mortality among new arrivals was approaching 45 percent, as malaria, dysentery, and typhoid fever swept over the displaced.
⁵

CHINESE CIVIL WAR

Death toll:
7 million (5 million killed in the first phase + 2 million killed in the second phase, not including the 10 million killed in the Sino-Japanese War)

Rank:
19

Type:
ideological civil war, failed state

Broad dividing line:
warlords vs. Communists vs. Nationalists vs. Japanese

Time frame:
1926–37, 1945–49

Location:
China

Quantum state participants:
Republic of China, Manchukuo

Major state participant:
Empire of Japan

Who usually gets the most blame:
Chiang Kai-shek and Japan

Summarized in 25 words or less:
“All Political Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun”—Mao Zedong

Another damn:
Chinese dynasty collapsing

Exit the Dragon

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese Empire was dying. The endemic corruption of the imperial government, combined with the colonial feeding frenzy of the Western powers, had undermined the credibility of the ruling Manchu dynasty. The only thing holding it together was the iron will of Dowager Empress Cixi, a former concubine who had been running the empire as regent through a string of child emperors she had handpicked for their compliance. Cixi was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping the empire afloat after the rebellions of the nineteenth century, but when she died in 1908, the new child emperor was adrift in a hostile world.

In October 1911, while the reform movement was still dithering over the details of how to ease into a modern republican government, a bomb being built by a cell of revolutionaries in the city of Wuhan accidentally exploded in their faces. When the police investigated, they discovered extensive files and lists of revolutionaries. Facing arrest for being on those lists, republicans inside the city’s army garrison mutinied and took over the local government. Soon garrisons all across China joined the mutiny, dragging their provincial governments along with them. Finally, Emperor Puyi abdicated, although he was probably too young to even know what that meant.

The first president of the republic was supposed to have been Sun Yat-sen, an American-educated Christian and the intellectual and spiritual leader of the republican movement. Since the army had started the revolution, however, it was the commander in Beijing, General Yuan Shikai, who ended up in charge.

For a while, Yuan ruled as an upright president with a national legislature, but over the next few years, he hoarded more and more power until he became a full-fledged dictator. Of course, the more he tried to boss around the provincial governments, the more they ignored him. Tibet and Mongolia openly declared their independence. By the time Yuan died of cancer in 1916, the central government was largely fictitious.

Thus began the age of warlords, but it may not have been quite as bad as that sounds. The warlords rarely fought each other in pitched battles. The average Chinese citizen still paid the same taxes, bribes, and protection money to the same local officials for the same lack of services, just as he had always done. The local officials passed a cut up to the provincial boss, as always. The only difference was that now the provincial boss kept the whole thing instead of sharing some with Beijing.

But a broken China was worse than a stable empire, no matter how corrupt. The breakdown of the central government allowed bandits to become more brazen in plundering the countryside. An official report noted that ten thousand towns and villages in one district of Honan Province had been held to ransom, and one thousand had been looted. “When they capture a person for ransom they first pierce his legs with iron wire and bind them together as fish are hung on a string. When they return to the bandit dens the captives are interrogated and cut with sickles to make them disclose hidden property.”
¹

The Northern Expedition

While the rest of the world was busy fighting the First World War, Japan tried to bully China into becoming a protectorate. The Beijing government—such as it was—tried to stand firm, but it eventually caved in. When the agreement became public in 1919, angry students marched and clashed with police (on May 4), among them a student librarian at Beijing University, Mao Zedong, who was just starting to take an interest in politics.

Riding the upsurge of nationalism in the May Fourth Movement, Sun Yat-sen was elected head of a government of sorts. His Guomindang (Nationalist) Party set up a rival regime in the southern city of Guangzhou (Canton). Then, in 1925, Sun Yat-sen died of cancer, and the Guomindang government passed to his army commander and posthumous brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek.
*

In July 1926, the Guomindang army launched several columns northward from Guangzhou with the goal of reunifying China. After a year of battling through all of the warlords in its way, Chiang Kai-shek’s army arrived at the Yangtze River, where it stopped for the winter to catch its breath.
²

At the mouth of the Yangtze River was Shanghai, the industrial heart of China. The Nationalist army had to approach Shanghai carefully because the foreign enclaves that covered most of the city were sovereign territory. In March 1927, undisciplined Nationalist troops had robbed and killed several foreigners in Nanjing, so Western warships were getting ready for trouble.
³

Shanghai accounted for half of the manufacturing in China, which meant the city contained half of China’s industrial proletariat as well. The Guomindang at the time headed a broad coalition that included the Communists, who now called a general strike in March in support of the approaching Nationalist army. As the city was brought to a halt, Chiang Kai-shek took control of the Chinese sector of Shanghai and reassured Westerners that life would soon return to normal; however, party factions began to fight over the spoils, and the coalition broke apart when Nationalist troops machine-gunned participants at a Communist protest rally.
⁴

This break in the coalition in 1927 is considered the formal beginning of the Chinese Civil War. The Left separated and established a rival regime in Wuhan, and Communists rose up in the streets of Guangzhou. Chiang Kai-shek took a few weeks to crush the rebellions, killing thousands of rioters in the streets of cities all over southern China. Then he extorted protection money from the foreign community of Shanghai, which financed the next step of the Northern Expedition beyond the Yangtze.

By the time the Nationalist columns entered Beijing in June 1928, they had either broken the warlords or made convenient alliances. After Chiang Kai-shek established the new capital of this theoretically reunified country at Nanjing, the name
Beijing
, which means “Northern Capital” in Chinese, had to be changed back to its older name, Beiping, “Northern Peace.”

With the Guomindang government safely settled in Nanjing, its reach contracted to just the Yangtze River valley. The warlords who had run for cover when the Nationalist army passed through now poked their heads up cautiously and resumed running their provinces. Rural Communists carved out backwater enclaves and organized their peasants into soviets. Western gunboats patrolled the rivers to protect trade and missionaries.

The Rising Sun

Among the parts of China under foreign control were the railroads. Most had been built by foreign capital, so foreign soldiers patrolled the tracks against bandits. The Japanese owned and guarded the lines that cut across Manchuria in the far northeast.

Over the previous sixty years, the Japanese had been doing everything they could to become just like the Europeans. They built factories and warships and dressed in suits and ties. They elected a parliament and tried to conquer all of the native peoples up and down the Pacific edge of Asia. Just like their European mentors, the Japanese had coaling stations, colonies, and concessions scattered throughout China.

Although liberals in the Japanese parliament opposed the automatic conquest of every neighbor, the militarist factions tended to assassinate anyone who spoke too openly against their empire-building. Pretty soon, the remaining opposition leaders learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. In many ways, however, the debate in Tokyo didn’t matter. The army was going to do whatever was necessary to enhance the glory of the emperor, with or without permission.

In 1931, a mysterious explosion destroyed a few feet of railroad track in Mukden (now Shenyang), so Japanese soldiers immediately seized all of the critical nerve centers in Manchuria and declared it the independent country of Manchukuo. They installed Puyi, the unemployed Manchu ex-emperor of China, as the ruler of this new nation and left their troops in place to make sure he did what he was told. Although it was widely suspected that the Japanese army had planted the bomb that caused the explosion, to create an excuse to respond in force, the rest of the world sputtered and raged without much effect.
⁵

The Long March

In 1927 Mao Zedong abandoned his second wife and their three children and set out into the countryside to stir up a peasant rebellion. His wife, Yang Kaihui, never saw him again. She had begun with a Communist compassion for the poor but had grown disillusioned by the realities of civil war. She dropped out of politics and tried to make sense of her world by writing her memoirs. “Kill, kill, kill! All I hear is this sound in my ears!” she wrote at the end. “Why are human beings so evil? Why so cruel?” In 1930, at the age of twenty-nine, a year after she wrote these words, her husband’s guerrilla activities came too close to home, so the local officials took her away and shot her.
⁶

Chiang Kai-shek tried to root out the Communist infestation in the countryside by launching several campaigns of annihilation, each larger than the last, but it wasn’t until the fifth annihilation campaign that the main force of the Communists, the Jiangxi Soviet, was shaken loose. In October 1934, all able-bodied Communists, 100,000 strong, pulled out and began a long, legendary withdrawal to a safer base of operations, far to the north and west. The Communists abandoned the weak, the sick, and the wounded, among them Mao’s feverish younger brother, who was subsequently killed by the Guomindang, and Mao’s infant son (by a third wife), who was mislaid and simply disappeared into the mass of nameless, rootless children the war was churning up.
⁷
The Reds slipped out of the Guomindang encirclement and retreated the hard way, eventually crossing eighteen mountain ranges, twenty-four rivers, and 6,000 miles in a year. Only 8,000 arrived at their new sanctuary in a dusty, mountainous loop of the Yellow River in October 1935.